By creating a cognitive computing system that could play
Jeopardy, IBM charmed the world with Watson, the system that beat two top
champions of the quiz show.Since that
famous game in February, 2011, IBM has engaged Watson on more practical
pursuits, including solutions for the healthcare and finance industries.

But we’re also using Watson to solve our own problems.In an organization as large as IBM, one of
the biggest challenges is knowledge sharing.In IBM, it is generally true that for any technology question, there is
at least one person in the company with the correct answer.But finding that person is too often
impossible.

Over the years, there have been several solutions to this
knowledge sharing problem.The
proliferation of wikis and online communities is the most current attempt to
provide a repository of knowledge and expertise.While these tools are immensely helpful and
go a very long way toward solving the knowledge sharing problem, users still
struggle to navigate this vast data source.Successful navigation requires some prior knowledge of who the experts
are, and their ontology, or how they logically structure and organize their
information.

So we know we have experts, data, and answers to just about
every question.But we can’t find a tool
to help us sift through that vast store of information.

Enter Watson.

Watson excels as culling through pedabytes of information and
deriving meaning from disparate sources.Watson can associate people with areas of expertise, and can place
information in a historical context.Watson, therefore, is the ideal cognitive system for IBM’ers
trying to solve problems for clients.

But Watson requires care and feeding to get to that
seemingly magical state of expertise.The data store is built by submitting thousands of questions and
providing links to the correct answers.It also helps to give Watson a data corpus for a subject area, even something as broad as cloud computing.

Imagine, if you will, that you had the opportunity to submit
questions and answers for Watson about cloud computing, What questions would you want Watson to be
able to answer?There are obvious
questions, like “What is cloud computing?” and there are thousands of questions
related to the technical depths below the umbrella phrase of “cloud
computing.”But what about less obvious
questions?For example, is there
agreement on who first coined the term “cloud computing?”

In the next few weeks, I’ll be contributing to the database
of cloud computing questions for Watson.If you have questions you think I should include, feel free to post them
here.